The Gameshouse

by Claire North

  Eight months later, I nearly caught her again, changing planes in Heathrow, and this time I unleashed the Metropolitan Police and UK Customs against her, grounding all flights and locking down British airspace. For two breathless hours, I thought, perhaps, perhaps I had her, but at the last minute she played the Home Office against me and in the ensuing bout I lost a police commissioner and a deputy head of the British Airport Authority, while she exposed a cabinet minister and a high court judge in her efforts to escape. The minister I removed with a carefully judged sex scandal; the high court judge was only four months from retirement so I let him live. She fled to where I knew not, and the game continued.

  For three years, it continued.

  Governments fall and economies decline. Banks shatter, computers fail, militaries rebel, borders close, deals collapse, pipelines run dry, satellites burn, men die, the world turns and the game goes on.

  Lying alone on a cheap hotel bed in Addis Ababa, a bowl of peanuts and an empty beer by my elbow, I did a mental inventory of the things we had destroyed in the name of this game and found it extensive. Not merely the pieces sent to their death or prison, but the lives broken every time we played a killer, removed a judge, shredded a government, crippled a bank. We—she and I—were the parents of civil unrest and carnage, the consequences of our actions spread now so wide that the pundits had begun to call the time of our game, “autumn years”, as the hope of previous “spring” years now gave way to the savagery that preceded winter.

  On a cargo ship crossing Lake Victoria, the flies crawling so thick above my mosquito net I could barely see the tiny porthole and its little circle of light beyond, I encountered the first attack against me by another player. Godert van Zuylen, who played a savage game without much finesse, launched a group of some fifty regional separatists against a governor I controlled in southern Turkey, killing the governor, setting the regional assembly on fire and prompting a crackdown far bloodier and greater than any I would have commanded. It was, as assaults against my position went, marginal, and ill-judged. It was, however, a disturbing sign, worrying enough for me to divert from my path and, with a small group of armed policemen, track him down to his apartment in Makassar, breaking into his rooms shortly before three in the morning and cable tying him, naked and gleaming with sweat, to the end of his bed.

  He didn’t shake or beg or scream as I pulled off my balaclava and squatted before him. If anything, he sighed in disappointment, not at my actions, I concluded, but at himself, having been so easily discovered.

  “Silver,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d waste the effort.”

  “Godert,” I replied. “I was going to say the same about you.”

  Even naked, exposed and on the edge of death, he had the old player’s pride. He had won too many victories, seen too many people fall before the power of his intellect, to believe that the same might happen to him now. “It’s not personal,” he explained. “My life is the Gameshouse—quite literally. If I cannot play, if I cannot win life, comfort and strength from weaker players, then I will die.”

  “You’ve lived a very long time,” I replied, “and the Great Game has only been playing for five years. Surely you can wait another five for it to reach its conclusion without wading in against me?”

  “You make it sound easy—five years is a long time for a man of my talents to be patient.”

  “Right there I think is a measure of just how limited your talent is.”

  He smiled, the smile of a man who, though he may seem weak, defeated, still knows he is strong. To a player of the middling sort, this confidence is a boon, a gift, for it empowers you to make decisions that others might flinch from, pushing pieces against positions that seemed—but are not—impenetrable. Van Zuylen was of the middling sort; his confidence was a lie, and would do him no good now.

  I reached into my pocket. Pulled out a coin. It was small, faded and bore the head of a long-dead emperor on one side, an eagle on the other. The writing was almost worn away around the edges, but once proclaimed in ancient Latin the eternity of an empire which had fallen thousands of years ago. I rolled it around my fingers, and the smile faded from van Zuylen’s face.

  “Do you know what this is?” I asked, as he watched the coin.

  He nodded, once.

  “Would you like to play a game?”

  “Not with that,” he replied. “Not like this.”

  “Did the Gamesmaster command you to turn against me, or was it your own idea?”

  “Silver…”

  “Come, come; I have, as you pointed out, expended a few slight resources in tracking you down. You owe me something in return.”

  “I owe you nothing.”

  “Then choose,” I said with a shrug, squeezing the coin tight in the palm of my hand. “Heads or tails.”

  He shook his head, licked his lips, his confidence faltering. Above us, a fan spun slowly in the ceiling; in the room below, the TV was turned up too loud, a series of aiiiis and hi-yaahs proclaiming that the observer was a fan of martial arts movies, and doubtless minions were being crashed even now beneath a hero’s boot. In the street outside, a woman screamed at her faithless boyfriend; a cat shrieked in the dark.

  “We turned,” he whispered. “She told us to and we did, of course we did: she’s the Gamesmaster; we’re…” He stopped, voice drying in his throat.

  “We’re what?” I asked. “We’re the players of the Gameshouse? The great and the brilliant, the masters of the higher league? We’re great, we’re powerful; at our command civilisations fall and gods are made? Is that it, Godert?”

  No answer. Confidence of the iron sort that van Zuylen’s was, when it breaks, it breaks entirely, a shivering, a shattering of strength.

  “We’re pieces,” I sighed, when he did not speak. “All of us, every player in the house, we are pieces in her hands. You played the higher games, and she played you. And now she’s turning you against me, is that right?”

  No answer.

  The coin rolled between my fingers.

  Then, “Everyone,” he hissed. “Everyone. The whole house. We’re all coming for you, Silver. Even the ones you trust. You think you’ve got friends? We’re players; we turn with the dice. I saw her two months ago and you know who was by her side? Remy Burke, the nearest thing you had to a brother. Even he’s turned against you; even he wants to live. She’s going to make you a slave. She’s going to put you in white and shackle you to the house, just like the umpires. Just like your wife.”

  The coin stopped, poised on an edge between my index finger and thumb, and there it remained.

  “Have you ever wondered what the Gameshouse is?” I mused. “Have you ever asked yourself what it is that the Gameshouse wants? We tell ourselves that the kings we have slaughtered, the armies we have defeated, the nations we have crushed—they were set on their path anyway, and we merely played the game, no more. But in 1914, I sat back in amazement as the game of diplomacy that had been so carefully played by such masterful adversaries for fifty years on the European board tumbled into carnage. How could this happen? I wondered, and then I looked again at the board, and I re-read the rules of the game and I saw that the dice were loaded. Millions have died in the course of our games, and we have changed the destiny of the world with our little sports. And for what? For a pattern on the board that only she can see; a future for humanity that only she can shape. We are pieces, Godert. We are nothing more than pieces.”

  So saying, I straightened up and slipped the coin back into my pocket. “I was inclined to give you a chance,” I said. “Fifty-fifty odds. But you are a piece in the hand of my enemy, and I have played pawns to take you out of play.”

  I turned, and walked away.

  He began to beg as my hand touched the handle of the door—no, Silver, please, Silver, I didn’t mean, I didn’t want, I’ll never again…

  I closed the door behind me on the way out, and the breeze-block walls somewhat muffled the sound of gunfire.

>   Chapter 28

  A submarine sinks in the Antarctic. A passenger plane is shot down over Georgia. Mexico teeters on the edge of civil war. Extreme nationalists come to power in Spain, and start expelling and imprisoning its enemies. A religious war breaks out in Mali. Russia cuts off gas to the EU. Three suicide bombers kill two hundred and eleven U.S. Marines in Washington State. Two prime ministers are assassinated, and a president dies under suspicious circumstances. The interest rate of the Federal Reserve drops to 0.1 per cent and six banks fold, taking with them two hundred and eighty thousand mortgages, five hundred and seventy-nine thousand pensions and, once all the investors they shatter are counted, nearly eighty thousand jobs.

  Would these things—and more, so much more—have happened were it not for the Game?

  Perhaps.

  But probably not.

  How long could I keep this up?

  Not as long as her, perhaps. Every day that the game went on was another in which pieces were weakened, the board edging slowly in her favour.

  I was tired. I was so very, very tired.

  On the three thousandth and eleventh day of the game, more than eight years after it had began, I sat in the bar of the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Saint-Malo and listened to the one singer on the stage belt out old Motown hits from beneath rhythmless flashing purple lights. At three a.m. the barkeeper disappeared, though the shutter was still up, and at four a.m. the two teenage boys in the arcade gallery next door finally gave up, their electronic guns falling silent, their slain digital enemies screaming no more. Only I remained, staring at nothing. I didn’t notice the music stop, barely noticed the singer reaching behind the bar to pour herself a whisky.

  You take the ferry a lot? she said.

  A bit, I replied. I travel.

  Why do you travel?

  My job.

  What’s the job?

  Consultant.

  She smiled at that, drained her whisky down, her skin flushed from the exertion of so much song to such an unreceptive audience. The engine of the ferry shuddered and whirred, the ship bumped a little as we hit a swell, rocking the bottles on their shelves.

  Consultant, she murmured. Hell—that could mean anything at all.

  To my surprise, I laughed. Yes! I said. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what it is. May I buy you another drink?

  I don’t drink with passengers.

  There aren’t any passengers here. There isn’t anyone here.

  You’re a passenger.

  No. Not really.

  A moment—a silence—in which we waited for each other. She half smiled and turned away, and I put my hand on her arm, gentle, the lightest of touches and said, If not a drink, how about a game?

  We played arcade games until the sun came up over Saint-Malo, an ancient town that had been destroyed and rebuilt, a strange mixture of medieval ideas and 1960s building materials. I was beaten at seven road races, died five times and only once managed to knock her out with my kung-fu special attack as we mashed controls and shrieked like children.

  I haven’t had this much fun since… I don’t know when! she said.

  Me neither, I replied.

  The company—they have this policy. Always smile, always polite, always say “please” and “thank you,” nothing more. They’re scared that if you laugh, or if you make a joke, someone will take it the wrong way and sue them. Everyone’s so scared of being taken the wrong way, these days.

  Yeah. I guess so.

  Isn’t it good just to laugh, though? Isn’t it good just to have fun? To be silly, to be happy, to forget about it all for a while? Isn’t it good to stop thinking about the world, and the mortgage, and your lover and your worries, and just have fun and be free?

  Yes, I replied, unable to look away from her eyes. Yes, it is.

  A moment in which 2-D figures in capes and tunics kicked and punched their way across the screens around us, in which music played and high scores flashed, and I wondered if I could just walk away. Step off this ship into the ocean, straight down, sink beneath the Atlantic waves, away from the Gameshouse, away from the Gamesmaster, away from the noise and the numbers and the pieces and the field, away from the game. All things stopped.

  When was the last time I had simply been me?

  I can’t remember.

  I can’t remember who I’d been before the game.

  She says, “You look sad.”

  I say, “It’s nothing.”

  She says, “You want another game?”

  She says, “Why are you crying? Are you okay? Why are you crying?”

  “It’s nothing,” I reply. “You just brought back some memories. Come on—let’s play.”

  We shot alien invaders and undead hoards, and I was resoundingly, joyously thrashed, and laughed a little at that, and kept on playing until the captain came on the Tannoy and said we were nearing harbour, and would drivers proceed to their cars, but not start the engines until asked.

  She puts her plastic gun down, kissed me on the cheek, said I was nice, it had been fun, maybe she’d see me another time, on the next ferry out, maybe.

  Then she was gone.

  Chapter 29

  The time had come to castle.

  In chess, this is the action of moving the king behind the protection of a rook, and hunting the Gamesmaster, I had the growing suspicion that she had already made this move, was fortified in some permanent base from which she could easily coordinate assaults against my still vulnerable, wandering self. Was castling safety or a trap? Perhaps both.

  I had an ongoing project. As the game turned and pieces fell, I fortified one corner of the board, transformed it into a little castle of my own, quietly, quietly, so she wouldn’t see it until it was ready to play. I set it up in Kyrgyzstan, near enough to the Chinese border that I could call on PLA air support, if I needed it. Seven years it took me to get it into place, but still one piece was missing.

  On the ninth anniversary of the commencement of the Great Game, the Gamesmaster launched an all-out assault on Jammu. In the fifteen hours in which battle raged, she poured the Indian army into the city, hunting me through every alley and down every dirty hole, and I launched mercenaries, separatists, criminals, idealists and extremists at her. The sound of gunfire blasted through the cold night, tracer bullets picking across the sky, and three times I made a break for the edge of the city, desperately seeking escape only to encounter tanks, squads of hard-faced soldiers, blockades, helicopters—the full might of India’s military—turned against me. The government said they were pacifying domestic extremism, and army trucks blared out commands to stay inside, co-operate, as men with faces hidden by metal helmets, shotguns in hand, went door to door looking for me.

  In the end, my pieces merely held the line; it was the Pakistani military, acting on its own initiative, which saved me. They put fifty thousand troops on the Kashmir border, and enough of the Indian government believe the threat to pull back from Jammu, leaving eight hundred and seventy-one people dead, and a single, plain-clothes hit squad which managed to take out the convoy I was fleeing on as it heads down the Sunderbani Road.

  I crawled from the wreckage of my overthrown vehicle to the sound of submachine gunfire, the scream of men, the smell of petrol, the splatter of flames and the dull pulsing of shrapnel embedded in my shoulder, and survived by hiding under the corpse of my driver long enough for the following convoy to arrive and draw the enemy off.

  A man and a donkey helped me over the mountains between Sunderbani and Kotla Arab Ali Khan. I remembered very little of the end of the journey, and woke in a dentist’s studio to find a man with a surgical mask and the largest pair of tweezers I’d ever seen pulling bits of embedded metal from my torn flesh. He wasn’t a piece, wasn’t a player.

  “I help people,” he said with a shrug. “That is my duty; that is what I do.”

  I struggled to understand his words, and blamed fatigue for my confusion.

  For two days I hid in the
dentist’s basement living room, eating rice cakes and mutton, until at last he found me a mobile phone and I called in a piece in Lahore who owned seventeen hotels, one TV station and, most importantly, a plane, and who smuggled me onto a flight carrying frozen sheep sperm to Ho Chi Minh City.

  Five days later, I was in the USA, arm in a sling, the lacerations to my face and neck fading to pink scars, and India is in turmoil. Like China before, I attempted to propel my pieces into the vacuum left by the fall of those pieces the Gamesmaster had expended on my capture—but this time, my every move was blocked, and I lost seven pieces to arrest and assassination before I was forced to conclude that the pieces she’d played in Jammu represented merely a part of her Indian assets, and I simply didn’t hold enough pieces to make the assault worthwhile in the subcontinent. The realisation was a bitter one: the Gamesmaster had unsuccessfully invaded Kashmir and still had pieces to play.

  I couldn’t match that kind of power.

  Cold and weary, I rode the Greyhound bus down Route 15, listening to the screaming of the baby, the snoring of the great fat salesman in the seat next to mine, and knew with an absolute certainty that her strength exceeded mine. I could not defeat the Gamesmaster—not on these terms.

  I closed my eyes and considered other plans.

  Chapter 30

  A stop in the desert.

  There was no town to the north, no town to the south. Sunlight and dust, as far as the eye could see. A sheriff in an oversized hat and brown shirt boarded the bus, asked folks to stay calm, walked down the aisle inspecting every face, stopped at my seat.

  “Can I see your ticket, sir?” he said, his hand on the butt of his gun.

  I showed him my ticket.